El jugador fantasma 1936

Angel Planells created this uncanny painting of a card player in an unknown year and with unknown materials. Looking at this painting, I can only imagine Planells lost in thought, carefully arranging objects into being with a fine brush. That hand bursting from the ground! What’s it made of? Is it stone or skin? And then there’s the horse-table and the dog floating above it – it's pure surrealist dreaming. I love the way these images are painted in a highly illusionistic style, yet everything is completely impossible. What a crazy card game! It seems that Planells is inviting us to play with the subconscious, mixing memory and desire. It’s almost as if we're looking at a theater set, and I wonder if that’s what it’s like to be a surrealist painter, staging dreamscapes and uncanny encounters for us to experience. The surrealists were all about artists in conversation with one another, riffing on ideas. I feel a sense of creative freedom in this painting.